By Luke Peterson

Mar/Apr 25

Though the well-established institutional and intellectual bias shown by Western media and the United States government toward Israel has been entrenched in this country’s psychology for three-quarters of a century, a new facet in the American insistence on the Israeli narrative has recently emerged. This new element legislates that the U.S. government and its myriad of entities and affiliates refuse to accept or endorse demographic statistics produced by the Palestinian government. 

Specifically, according to a brief provision buried within the recently passed National Defense Authorization Act (NDAA), which authorized a colossal new $895 billion spending package for the U.S. military, the U.S. will not accept casualty figures from the Gaza Health Ministry as it endeavors to keep up with the nearly interminable list of dead, injured, or missing Gazans since the most recent Israeli assault on that population began in October of 2023. 

Ostensibly, this line-item proviso was attached to the NDAA to maintain intellectual balance in U.S. government recordkeeping on Israel and Palestine. Congress’ stance over Gaza works according to Israeli propaganda requirements that, despite the prolific destruction wrought upon that territory by the Israeli military over the course of the last 15 months, is still largely under the official sway of the Hamas government, a political organization founded in the ideology of resistance to the illegal Israeli occupation of Palestine. Rejecting the Gaza Health Ministry’s statistics is therefore a hedging of bets by the U.S. government. They will not trust Gazan health statistics because Gaza is governed by Hamas, and the U.S. considers Hamas a terrorist entity and is therefore not to be trusted. Lawmakers on both sides of the barely visible political aisle when it comes to this topic agreed on this point all while Israeli statistics are naturally not burdened by the stain of partiality for some reason that has never been explained by the federal government. 

This trend mandating that officials reject statistical information coming from the Gaza Ministry of Health is a new phenomenon. In fact, aspersions cast upon official figures provided by the Gaza Health Ministry began only after the widely lauded humanitarian agency Amnesty International (AI) confirmed for the world what Palestinians already knew: Israel’s indiscriminate assault on Gaza beginning in October of 2023 constitutes genocide. 

AI’s established record as an international watchdog has made it into a standard-bearer of fact in reporting on crises and conflicts all over the world. Today, it is a much relied-upon agency informing state governments as well as political coalitions like the European Union, and it has declared statistics from the Gaza Health Ministry to be factual and reliable. Nevertheless, the official U.S. position is to ignore AI’s finding on the ongoing Israeli genocide in Gaza. As it has done for the past 75 years of this occupation, the U.S. government simply looks away when truly neutral agencies like AI clamor for a ceasefire to protect innocent civilians in Gaza.

AI is not alone in trusting the Gaza Health Ministry to report on intentional Israeli efforts to exterminate the Palestinians. Statistics coming out of the government in Gaza are also trusted by the U.N. Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs. Further, the World Health Organization and Human Rights Watch cite Gaza Ministry of Health figures in their reporting on the destruction of the Palestinian society by the Israeli occupiers. 

Where Israeli crimes are concerned, however, it seems AI’s word confirming the Gaza Health Ministry’s assessment of the carnage done to their own people by the Israeli onslaught is not sufficient for the U.S. government or media establishment. So, continuously in the throes of the ongoing American love affair with Israel, while at the same time rejecting international confirmation of the Ministry of Health in Gaza, the American news establishment deliberately leaves consumers in the dark regarding Israeli brutality in the Gaza Strip. 

As such, the extent of the Israeli destruction of Gaza since October of 2023 is largely unknown to Americans. A key component within that body of ignorance is a profound lack of knowledge about the number of Palestinian dead in Gaza (at least 45,541 including 17,492 children with an additional 11,160 missing) and the percentage of those casualties that were civilian non-combatants (no less than 70% according to Gaza Ministry of Health statistics and verified by additional, international observers). And there is simply no way to account for the thousands of Palestinians who now lie buried under the rubble, a number which may well escalate the number of casualties in Gaza to between 64,000 and 186,000 dead.

Such deliberate obfuscation of the numbers of dead and missing in Gaza by the U.S. news media is perhaps only the most blatant example of that institution carrying water for the state of Israel since 1948, and especially since October of 2023. In addition to these omissions, analysis of the news covering the genocide in Gaza during this period has demonstrated utterly biased coverage in favor of the Israeli narrative across news media outlets in the U.S. In reputable publications from The New York Times to The Washington Post to the Los Angeles Times, coverage of the war on Gaza has enacted hyperbolic language to describe Israeli deaths while downplaying or omitting the killing of Palestinians, a massacre of citizenry more than 40 times larger than the deaths of Israelis that occurred on October 7. 

In a detailed analysis of more than 1,000 news articles from those sources mentioned above, the independent outlet The Intercept uncovered a glaring bias in the U.S. media’s approach to the ongoing destruction of Gaza. “Highly emotive terms for the killing of civilians like ‘slaughter’, ‘massacre’, and ‘horrific’ were reserved almost exclusively for Israelis who were killed by Palestinians, rather than the other way around,” the report read. “The term ‘slaughter’ was used by editors and reporters to describe the killing of Israelis versus Palestinians 60 to 1, and ‘massacre’ was used to describe the killing of Israelis versus Palestinians 125 to 2. ‘Horrific’ was used to describe the killing of Israelis versus Palestinians 36 to 4.” 

Further, shockingly few stories emanating from these standard bearers of U.S. news ever mentioned the staggering number of Palestinian children and journalists that have been killed by Israel. “Only two headlines out of over 1,100 news articles in the study mention the word ‘children’ related to Gazan children,” the Intercept report stated. “The word ‘journalists’ and its iterations such as ‘reporters’ and ‘photojournalists’ only appears in nine headlines out of over 1,100 articles studied.” 

Much more concern was shown by U.S. news media over child killings and the targeting of journalists in Ukraine during this period of time versus the much more numerous casualties of this type inflicted by Israel in Gaza. In the light of this analysis and others of its kind, it is reasonable to conclude that U.S. news media simply does not want its readership to know about the Israeli slaughter of the Palestinians either in its gory detail or even by description in broad strokes. 

So, we are left with an unclear picture of the damage done by Israel in Gaza, and if we continue to put our faith in the authoritative U.S. news media, we will remain ignorant of the horrific crimes committed by America’s closest ally in the Middle East. 

Worse than the promotion of ignorance about this genocide, though, is the the fact that the U.S. is materially abetting Israel’s actions. With only a few weeks left of his bitterly disappointing presidency, Joe Biden authorized an additional $8 billion in weaponry to Israel. Little wonder, then, that American newsmakers want media consumers to look the other way when it comes to Israel’s mass murder in Gaza. What might an accurately informed citizenry do about a government that actively participates in genocide? 

Luke Peterson, Ph.D., The University of Cambridge–King’s College, is a professor of Arabic and Middle Eastern Studies based in Pittsburgh. He is also the author of The U.S. Military in the Print News Media: Service and Sacrifice in Contemporary Discourse (2024).

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By S. Amjad Hussain

Mar/Apr 25

After 15 months of relentless bombing of Gaza in which much of the walled-off territory was reduced to rubble and more than 64,000 civilians were killed (as calculated by The Lancet journal in January 2025), Israel has agreed to a ceasefire. In essence, the conditions of this ceasefire render it identical to the proposal that then-U.S. President Joe Biden announced last summer.

Why did it take more than six months to implement a proposal that had already been agreed upon? It seems that Israeli domestic politics got in the way. Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s right-wing government depends on the support of six extreme right parties that together make up 64 of the ruling coalition’s seats in the 120-seat Israeli Knesset.

These parties were set against the ceasefire and vowed to leave the government if Netanyahu agreed to it. Israel’s avowedly fascist Security Minister Itamar Ben-Gvir was true to his word in this case and resigned his position in protest, but most of the others within the coalition stayed and saved the government from collapse.

The question remains: What made the Israeli government agree to a ceasefire in the first place? Israel felt pressured by the return of Trump. 

In the final negotiation, Trump’s Middle East envoy, Steven Witkoff (who is not a diplomat, but a New York real estate investor), played a pivotal role in pressuring Netanyahu to accept the deal that he had rejected many times before over the past year. Allegedly, Netanyahu was ultimately convinced to accept the deal when the Trump team also promised to empty the Gaza Strip of Palestinians. 

The ceasefire calls for phased release of Israeli hostages in exchange for hundreds of Palestinian prisoners. But Palestinians in Israeli prisons are, in fact, hostages. When innocent men, women, and children are kidnapped from their homes in Gaza and on the West Bank and kept in administrative detention without being charged with any crime, they are hostages held by the occupying state. And when these hostages are “tried” in Israeli military courts, the outcome is a foregone conclusion. Israeli military courts have a higher than 95% conviction rate for Palestinian defendants since 1967.

The ceasefire also calls for an increase in the flow of food into the Gaza strip. During their assault on Gaza, Israel allowed in a fraction of the food that was ready to enter the Strip. In December 2024, Human Rights Watch stated that Israel was using starvation as a weapon. In the first three days after the ceasefire, though, at least 2,400 food and aid trucks entered Gaza.

However, the ceasefire is, at best, a murky arrangement as Israel continues its aggression in what is left to Palestinians in the West Bank. And considering the power held by the Israeli lobby on the American political establishment, it cannot be ruled out that Israel would find some flimsy excuse to restart their genocide against the Palestinians once all of its people have been retrieved. 

One wonders why Biden and Secretary of State Antony Blinken were not able to accomplish what Trump did even before becoming president? The simple answer is pressure.

Biden refused to use America’s enormous leverage against Israel and continued sending billions in military aid to a state committing genocide until the very end of their administration. But as the left-leaning Israeli newspaper Haaretz put it succinctly, Israel only understands force. By not using political leverage while at the same time repeating the fatuous mantra of two-state solution, Biden and Blinken were really talking from both sides of their mouths. As a result, over the course of the past four years, we have seen precious little accomplished by the Biden administration to achieve any sort of peace in the Middle East.

On Jan. 15, 2025, Blinken addressed the Atlantic Council think tank, stating: “It is time to forge a new reality in the Middle East in which all people are more secure, all can realize their national aspirations, all can live in peace. Is that hard to achieve? Yes. Peace in the region has always been. Is it impossible? No. Is it necessary? Absolutely, yes.”

The ad nauseum repetition of a two-state solution has become a joke, especially coming from the former U.S. Secretary of State. More than any other person in Biden’s circle, Blinken knew that Israel would never agree to a two-state solution.

Trump injected another element into this complex equation when he suggested the idea of having Indonesia take in one million-plus Palestinians. No sooner had he made that ridiculous suggestion than he lobbed another idiotic bombshell, asking Jordan and Egypt to take refugees from Gaza. Upon finding no response, he even brought up the possibility of bringing Albania into the deal.

Trump is parroting the views of Israeli, American, British, and European right-wing politicians. They want to build Jewish settlements in Gaza by “voluntary” repatriation of Gazans to other Arab countries. In common parlance, Trump’s proposal is nothing more than ethnic cleansing.

For Palestinians it is a double whammy. First a genocide with the tacit approval of the United States and now an attempt to ethnically cleanse Gaza for good.

It is said that Arab countries have sold their honor and traditions to the interests of the United States. Following this line of thought, the Jimmy Carter engineered Camp David Accords between Israel and Egypt was the first step in this surrender. Subsequently other Arab countries – typically ruled by despots – have also given up on solidarity with Palestine mostly in exchange for American military products and/or protection. 

And now the Abraham Accords have brought most Arab countries into the United States’ sphere of interest and in turn, into Israel’s. The only notable regional hold out so far is Saudi Arabia.

Considering Trump’s propensity to retaliate against those who refuse to buckle under his dictates, it is not beyond him to issue an ultimatum to his Arab client states to either toe the line or be ready for retaliation.

That is why it is time that all Arab countries come together and devise a common strategy for the future of the Middle East that is based on their shared history and values. Only then Palestine will have a true ally in the region. 

S. Amjad Hussain, MD, FRCSC, FACS, D.Sc. honoris causa, is Emeritus Professor of Cardiothoracic surgery at the College of Medicine and Life Sciences; and Emeritus Professor of Humanities, College of Arts and Letters University of Toledo.

An earlier version was published in The Blade of Toledo, Ohio, on January 29, 2025.

The post Israel Has Committed Genocide in Gaza appeared first on Islamic Horizons.

By Hamza Khan

Mar/Apr 25

Zaynab Mohamed, 27, and Yasmin Trudeau, 40, have never met, but their lives tell the same powerful American story. Mohamed was nine years old when her family immigrated to Minnesota after fleeing war in Northern Somalia. Trudeau, a Bengali American, faced her own share of adversity having spent her childhood navigating the foster-care system in Washington State. Both women pushed through seemingly insurmountable odds to ascend to the state legislature, Mohamed as a Senator in Minnesota representing District 63, and Trudeau in Washington State Senate District 27.

The Democratic duo is part of a small yet growing trend. In 2023, a record 235 Muslims were elected to public office, according to a joint analysis by the Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR) and the Jetpac Resource Center. While data for 2024 has yet to be released, the number has risen steadily since 2020, with new names emerging each year.

From the Classroom to the Legislature

The journey often takes shape in the classroom. Despite living in 11 homes between 7th and 12th grade, Trudeau would go on to win her high school’s Gates Achievement Award, setting her on a path toward college and ultimately, law school. “Regardless of how many places I lived or how things were like, that was the thing in the back of my mind – just finish your education,” said Trudeau, who in 2021 became the first Muslim member of Washington State’s legislature.

A 2017 study by the Institute for Policy and Understanding found that Muslims are 8% more likely to graduate college than the average American. Mohamed was no different. She found purpose through the Minneapolis “Step Up Program,” through which she worked at a bank during high school and college. At the same time, she taught her mother how to read English. 

Mohamed credited her work supervisor with setting her on a path of success. “Now that I look back as a young person, that was one of the most meaningful things that has ever happened to me,” said Mohamed, who was one of eight children. “Because none of my siblings have gone to school here, and all my family members have had no one, and nothing.”

Neither Trudeau nor Mohamed actually planned to pursue politics. Like many in immigrant families, they initially prioritized stability over risk. It is perhaps for this reason that while Muslims are underrepresented in local government, they make up around four times their share of the population in medicine.

“Muslim Misfits” Make History 

But growing up in a changing America often means adopting changing roles. Trudeau was in law school when she found herself in a heated debate with a classmate over the “intent behind law.” Passionate about immigration advocacy, she found herself wanting to do more than just learn – she wanted to shape policy.

Mohamed, who is 13 years younger than Trudeau, was swept up in the activist fervor of 2020 when George Floyd was murdered a few blocks from her parents’ house. Neither were alone in their passion. Two years before George Floyd’s murder at the hands of the Minneapolis Police Department, fellow Muslims Rashida Tlaib and Ilhan Omar were making history as the first Muslims elected to the U.S. House of Representatives in 2018. Both women got their start in the state legislature.

Still, the road ahead wasn’t steady for these groundbreaking women. Trudeau’s background as the daughter of a young single mother often left her feeling ostracized in a conservative Muslim community. But her mother’s words still echo in her ears: “No matter what, you’re a Muslim.”

“I was like, ‘Mom, the Muslim community barely accepts you,’” Trudeau said. “And she was like, ‘They don’t need to.’ And that really stood out to me.” Trudeau spent her years after law school working for Washington State Senator Pramila Jayapal (D), who now serves in the U.S. Congress. Later, Trudeau joined the state Attorney General’s office, which at the time was challenging then-President Donald Trump’s Muslim ban.

In 2021, the seven-member Pierce County Council unanimously appointed Trudeau to the Washington State Senate. She has since won an election in 2022 and reelection in 2024. And despite the hardships that accompany Trudeau’s unique background, she often found herself at an advantage. “We have a lot of different things that impact our folks, and so I think that actually the ‘Muslim misfits’ are probably the most primed to have these nuanced conversations on behalf of our communities,” Trudeau said. “Because we’ve experienced that we’re not a monolith, and we understand that that’s not the goal.”

The same year Trudeau was appointed, Mohamed took her passion for social justice to CAIR-Minnesota, where she worked as the director of advocacy. She then began managing campaigns for Minneapolis city council candidates, eventually becoming a policy aide for a sitting councilmember. “I guess when you’re really angry at the world, it’s easy to learn things that you want to be good at to better the world,” Mohamed said with a chuckle. “So that’s sort of what got me into organizing.”

Not a year into her job as an aide, the sitting state senator of 16 years, Patricia Torres Ray, retired. Before Mohamed even thought of running, the hashtag “RunZaynabRun” spread across social media. In a decision that still surprises her to this day, Mohamed threw her hat in the ring. The result was a landslide primary and general election win in 2022. In January 2023, Mohamed made history as the youngest woman to ever serve in Minnesota’s State Senate.

“There will always be somebody who tells you to wait your turn,” said Mohamed, who recalled being told she was too young to mount a successful campaign. “If you know what you’re doing, and you believe in the value you can bring to an institution, just run.”

Trudeau, too, was surprised by the positive response from her community. New Jersey, Michigan, and California take the helm as states with the most elected Muslim officials. As a Muslim politician in Washington State, Trudeau was a trailblazer.

She recalled interviewing a prospective staff member, a Palestinian Christian, who tearfully expressed concern about being a political liability. “I was like, oh, no, this office – don’t worry about that for a second,” Trudeau said.

Groundbreaking Muslim Women Paying it Forward 

Both Trudeau and Mohamed have since worked on a slew of legislation, including investments in affordable housing, wage reform, and homelessness prevention programs. They have also received warm reviews from their constituents. In her 2024 race, Trudeau won by a nearly 44% margin.

And if more Muslims are looking to get their names on the ballot, Trudeau hopes they know they are not alone. “It’s gonna feel uncomfortable and awkward, and you’re never gonna feel like you fully fit anywhere,” Trudeau said. “But that’s how a lot of people feel in this country all the time. So if anything, I think we translate an experience that really goes beyond just the Muslim community.”

Neither could forget the mentors and educators who helped them find their footing in the world. For Mohamed, this was her old boss, who taught her how to apply to college. “I still talk to him,” Mohamed said. “Every few months he still checks up on me.”

Trudeau remembered fondly the late Professor José Goméz at Evergreen State College. When she had told him she was always interested in law, he simply responded with: “Well then — we’re gonna help you become a lawyer.”

Hamza Khan, a New York-based freelance journalist, previously worked for WICZ FOX 40.

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